Speeches

‘Lagos Mega City: We Are Increasing Our Capacity To Respond To People’s Needs’ - Fashola

Jul 8, 2009 - Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen, I thank you for responding to my invitation and for eating the lunch as well. I will like to start by saying that this type of forum cannot, in our current circumstances, be too often necessary or too burdensome, not only for us in Government but also for the people who put us here. I say that because a few questions have been raised here which re-enforce the view that some of my colleagues and I, just may have held that maybe, just maybe, we make the assumption too quickly that our people know enough of how this system operates. I, therefore, feel there is need to do more of this. I will explain, but some of my responses will, probably, elicit the explanations in more details. But clearly, we make an invalidated assumption that people know enough and I am saying that we are not quite on top of it there. We need to do a lot more.

OKADA RIDERS
I like to start from the reverse order. Let’s deal generally with the Okada. There was a suggestion first that we were in position to deal with the Okada and then we had to succumb for political considerations and someone else ventilated that issue and asked what is the specification of motorcycles that are supposed to ply Ikorodu Road and other major highways. Clearly, there are 60 or 70 CC capacities (I am not sure now) but the popular ones that we see have no place on Eko Bridge, or Ikorodu Road or 3rd Mainland Bridge as a matter of law and we are working on policies to enforce that law.

But let me say that the problem of Okada is not a government problem; it is a peoples’ problem. And we have to understand; this is why I said that maybe we assume that our people know enough. Okada is not a joy ride; it is a business. If truly we do not want Okada, how many of us are ready to walk that extra two kilometres and say ‘I will not ride an Okada’? Our job will have been done by more than half if people make that choice, I do not want Okada and I will not climb it. With all of our best efforts, with about 33,000 police officers, where is the capacity to chase Okada from every nook and cranny of Lagos? There is none. So this is a peoples’ problem. If we take the economic benefit out of it, Okada will disappear in the same way that it appeared. It is that simple. So the choice really is the peoples’ choice. Do we want it or not?, because if Government starts, the next thing will be ‘Fashola does not have human face; he wants to create unemployment’. You will write it.

So, it is not just us as a Government; it is us as a people who must make that choice. If there is no passenger for Okada, they will look for another business. It must be worth it and that is why more of it is coming in. I think that I want us to look at it that way; as a country, as a State, as a people, is it the mode of transportation that we want? That decision will come, of course, with its inconvenience, but it must be the price that we must elect to pay for the way we want to live. Of course, having chosen to use Okada, we have paid the prize, broken limbs, severed limbs, deaths, orphans, widows, widowers. We have to decide whether we want to continue to play that part. I have made that point in the public before, walking does not kill a man but Okada can kill you. So, I just want to leave it at that and say that it is a peoples’ choice and not a government choice.

LASTMA
The question about LASTMA and all of that, yes there is the need to employ more people. We have recently recruited about 500 new LASTMA staff. They are undergoing training; uniforms have to be prepared for them. They are also being prepared before we expose them to the public. There is a minimum code of conduct here that we think is acceptable in terms of courtesy, in terms of being firm but yet being fair, and truly, unless we expect that we will go and import aliens to come and run our country, we are using the materials that we have; we are using Nigerians, you and I. We are asking people now beyond providing uniforms for them, educating them about traffic laws, we are trying to get people to lecture them, teach them and interact with them and it is something also that I hope some of you will sign unto and go to the schools and lecture them in the training schools. We are also looking at situations where members of the Civil Society, members of private organizations can volunteer and say ‘today, I want to work with LASTMA and help you in managing traffic and model behaviour. It’s not going to happen by magic, all of us have to roll up our sleeves and pull up our straps if we want change here. And if you have volunteers send them in to us. We need every hand on deck, if we must transform this society.

But we won’t solve all of our traffic problems through manual means. There is a limit to which human capacity, especially in the face of increasing technology, can go; and that is why you see in some areas we deploy solar powered, traffic lights to try and manage traffic at some intersections and on some major road junctions. Again, we have the difficulty of our environment. For the last two years, we have been trying to get people to come and manufacture street lights and solar lights within the country and the environment continues to provide the challenge for investment and all of that. So even if I need solar powered traffic light, I am going to have to import it and it has to go through the congested ports. And, therefore, there is that time lag between plan and implementation before you really see the effect. That is the environment in which we have to operate.

APAPA AND ADJOINING AREAS
On the issue of the Military Barracks, Apapa, Point Road access and all of that, again, may be it is the lack of information that is why we continue to share this. It won’t happen overnight. In the last two years, what we have done is to zone developments across the State. It may well be that in your area where we chose to start may not be your street. We have zoned Apapa, for example, for the development of the major highways there as a start; and if you go there as I speak, you will find Julius Berger there working on, at least four major roads there. In every budget cycle of twelve months, we are constrained by the size of the budget and what we can finance; and in the next year, we have to carry what we have to finish and begin to plan. I have said it before that this State can easily absorb and utilize a budget of a trillion Naira, subject to certain conditions; one, can we raise a trillion Naira? Are people ready to pay more taxes? That is the primary source of public expenditure – taxation. It is not from my salary because my wife will have to collect house-keeping allowance and I am going to pay my children’s school fees. Are you ready to pay more? So the size of the budget every year is circumscribed by the reality of where we can earn it. And that includes even when we make provision for a situation that okay, let’s see if we can be lucky this year against any extra-ordinary income.

We have a budget of N405 billion for example, for this year. At typical rate of about N13 to N14 billion that we are doing every month, maximum that gives you about N168 billion. And so, that N14 billion that everybody is saying ‘O yes Lagos is now earning N14 billion’, calculate it over 12 months; and it gives you only N168 billion. That’s the reality. On the average we get another N5 to N6 billion maximum, average from the FAC proceeds. Add it up, N72 billion plus N168 billion; that is what we are chasing all the way. Now, assuming that we even have N405 billion in cash today, where is the capacity to utilize it? How many construction companies can you clearly say that if I give this construction company work to do, I don’t have to go there everyday to supervise them? The contractor won’t run away with the money, the contractor won’t abandon the job; the contractor has skilled people who are ready to work? These are the issues we deal with. So there is a capacity problem. I will come to the question of the quality of the roads that we build as we go on; but I think the point must be made that we need to tell you more about how this budget works. At the end of the year, the Government’s budget is wiped down to zero and you have to start again in the New Year.

We have, in the last two years, transited to what we call Mid-term Expenditure Framework where you can plan for three years. But it is a whole culture change involving a lot of training, a lot of education, for the operators of the budget to probably act from what they have been used to, it won’t happen overnight. That is why in this budget cycle we are already starting budget consideration meetings now for next year’s budget to prepare things in advance. We are encouraging everybody, ‘bring up what you are currently executing, and make it as a priority item for the next budget year and then let’s see what we can chew throughout the year and what is left to start the new budget. We can’t start new ones if we don’t finish what we are doing.

And, therefore, those in Apapa, Ijegun and all those places, there is no Local Government today where this Government is not present. If we are not building a school, we are providing water or we are providing a road, or we are addressing a drainage problem or we are building markets or providing rural electrification. There is no local government where we are not present. So, if we have not gotten to you, these are the challenges that make it impossible at this time to get to everybody at the same time. But what you must see is a process that is moving progressively. And, therefore, in two years, or add the last eight years to make it ten years, is that sufficient time to reverse the gap of 30 years?
Certainly it must just work stage by stage. If you want to build this small bungalow and you put all the material down here right now and all of the workmen, it won’t start up by itself. It must go from stage to stage until it is finished and this is what is happening on a general basis.

POLICE EXHIBITS
The issue raised about police exhibits is again a culture that we have tried to change. I have spoken to a few of the senior police officers and said ‘look, in the light of the available technologies that we have, and I have actually written to the Police High Command that we can start this for you in Lagos. When there is an accident, we can take the photograph of the vehicle and release the vehicle on bond to the owner, let him go and fix his vehicle. And since there is a photograph of the vehicle stored in a digitally retrievable manner, we can reproduce it when it is time to produce evidence in court. And in any case, I don’t recall, in the 16 or so years that I practiced Law, when they brought an accident vehicle in the courtroom. So, it is just a culture change. And we are saying we are ready to assist, buy these computers, provide the space in the various police stations and the people who will manage it we will train and supply the computers. I have yet not gotten the go ahead to start it. This, for me, is the simple way to solve this problem. So we are willing to do it. And if there are other ways, of course, that you think that the problem can be better managed, we are open to ideas. That is my own thinking; I don’t have all of the answers to all of the problems. And that is one assumption that I think operates out there in the public domain. For some reason or the other, may be you credit us with super human of capacity. But truly, there is no magic wand to it. We need every thought, every idea, every effort, and every perspective to be able to make a rounded decision that becomes robust and sustainable. As I was telling some of my colleagues on that table, once I go out in the morning, what I am looking for and what I see are problems from morning till night. It is enough to last me a lifetime. And so when you get back home in the evening and are saying ‘okay, how do we solve this, how do we solve that’, the last thing you want to hear is somebody who calls you again to say there is yet another problem. So it’s like, how do you dam the flood so that you have a dry place to stand to solve the identified problems. Otherwise you just sit down for four years listening to problems and not solving any at all. Every waking hour, there is problem. But as I said before, this is what this job requires, solving problems.

SPECIAL STATUS
The question about a special status for Lagos and the allocation of resources from the Federal Government is really for me not only a matter of necessity but a matter of economic commonsense. I think if we view the Federal Government and the Federal Republic of Nigeria as a growing concern that must continue to remain sustainable, anything that requires economic success of that federation, if I was the manager, I will be looking at the most impactful area. When Lagos was the Capital of the Federation, Lagos was always given special allocation. They did it with schools; they did it with other things. So every time the Supreme Military Council was making provision, it must make provision to support Lagos. All of this is documented and I have it. So asking for special status for Lagos should not be a question for debate. It is a question of commonsense. It is a question of the economic interest of this country. The economy of India today is being sustained by only one city, Mumbai. It is the engine that is driving everybody.

Then, of course, the question about the status of Lagos as a Mega city, this is what I have always said. It wasn’t as if this Government chose that Lagos will be or is a mega-city. There is nothing esoteric about that term mega city, it does not, I must say, convey a Disneyland perception as may be some people might have erroneously thought . It is a classification by the United Nations for benchmarking population growth in major cities. The threshold is 10 million, so that once a city hits ten million in population, it becomes a mega city. And, therefore, whether we call ourselves a megacity or we don’t call ourselves a megacity, we are already a mega city by status. It is a status. The analogy I have always used is the analogy of a young man who because he is not married, he can call himself a married man but everybody knows he is not married. He is still a bachelor. And that will still be his status. If he likes let him go and contract the marriage in the pit of the Lagoon once the story leaks out that he is living with a wife, his status changes to that of a married man. The status of a bachelor, he does not care if there is food in the house, but once he has a wife, he must provide for her. So, it brings on its own responsibilities and its own consequences. The same thing happens when you attain the status of a mega-city, whether you call yourself a mega city or not, it brings its own consequences because it is more people and the consequence, therefore, is that you need more utilities. You need more water, you need more schools, you need more roads, you need more police. You need more of everything to sustain life. So that, really, is what it is about.

The objective we have set for ourselves is that there are a few mega-cities around the world. Lagos is estimated to be the third largest mega-city by 2015 because it is projected the population will grow by a certain number. Now, as we benchmark with Dubai and Tokyo and other cities that clearly have a head-start over us in terms of addressing those consequential demands of mega-city status, we have decided to look inwards and say, okay, who is close to us on this Continent, Cairo. Let us benchmark ourselves and say we want to be a model mega-city in Africa as a start; that we want to be a destination of best practices. When you are looking for mega-cities in Africa, we don’t have to be number five, we want to be number one. May be after that, we can set for ourselves a new target, that we want to be a model global mega-city in terms of our ability to respond to our peoples’ needs. That is, really, what it is about.

TAXATION
On taxation, let me say, first of all that, yes we seem all too conscious of taxation in its now formal sense when we run a formal form of government. But, let us remember that from those ages of kingdoms and monarchies and obaships and all of that where governments in the Oyo Empire, Mali Empire, when there was no democracy, no formal form of government, when there were no formal republics, taxation was still a major component of public expenditure. It was taken in form of slaves; it was taken in form of farmlands; it was taken in form of yams; it was taken in all sorts of forms; it was exerted in all sorts of forms. As human evolution has continued, the structure has become more quantifiable in cash which is now the medium of exchange as we have moved away from less standardized medium of exchange. So it is a vexed question; nobody wants to pay it even in Europe, in America and in Asia. And that is why in those jurisdictions, even when the police fail to get evidence against somebody who they are convinced is a criminal; they will take the lesser option and charge him for tax evasion because nobody wants to pay tax and that is why I call it a vexed question.

Really, the truth is that it is the only way of public expenditure. All of what you have talked about today, from Apapa to Ifako-Ijaiye to Amuwo-Odofin, the question of no food, no water and no roads, that’s the bottom-line. Now, it has its own incidents. It brings you into government, because we must see the government as not just us, it is all of us; we are only your representatives. And I will use this analogy; If you look at government as a larger form of a town hall meeting, a town union, your old boys’ association, your Ikoyi Club, your Yoruba Tennis Club, your Ikeja Country Club, if you don’t pay dues, you don’t go in. It’s that simple. They call it financial membership, if you are not in, you are out. If they are holding meeting and they say only financial members can speak, that is the reality. So this is what it is all about. Dues are a very vexed issue in those clubs, I know. Nobody wants to pay them it but they want to use the club. So, when the club president imposes a levy for development, we protest very vehemently. That is the same thing that is happening in a larger society, it is not new, I didn’t invent it. Unless you give me another source of public expenditure, really, we are stuck with tax.

So, I think what we should be looking at; the real critique or evaluation of any tax is how fairly it distributes the wealth and responsibility across board. That should be the debate; that is why I would love to come and sit here and say look between people who earn up to N2,000 or N3,000, they get a relief because I am transferring this responsibility to those who earn N2 million rather than about whether or not people should pay tax. I have asked them to circulate a publication of our tax authority addressing the frequently asked questions as it relates to the taxation of religious institutions. And I think, first of all that because taxation is a vexed question, the very simple notion or linkage of tax and religious bodies is bound to engender the exclamation: ‘they want to tax religious bodies’. They don’t want to know whether you are taxing the religious body or the religious operators. ‘He can’t dare it’. And so nobody is looking at the detailed cold print of how the tax itself operates. Their emotional reaction has taken over the fact of the situation. “What is he saying?”

If you look at that pamphlet on Frequently Asked Questions, the first question there is, “Are religious organizations liable to pay taxes? And the answer is no. This has been published in some of your papers. People that are employed by the religious organizations in Lagos, they also use the roads, they are secured by the police, we clear their refuse, they drink water, even if you say they are not enough, their children use our public schools. Let’s share these responsibilities. It is not morally right for me to turn my back from collecting charges from income that they earn simply because it may be unpopular politically and continue to deduct the taxes of civil servants because it’s convenient to do so. That’s not right. And so the truth about it is that many of them do pay taxes. I will keep their confidences but quite a number of them have come to say ‘this is the right thing you’re doing, this is my tax card’. We have started a stakeholders’ meeting to begin to educate them, to inform them and to say, let’s look at it without emotion. And, of course, I didn’t make the law. The law has been there for years, it wasn’t enforced. So I hope that provides all of the answers that you need on the matter and I hope you will help us to enlighten people to be less emotional and be more factual in really looking at what we are saying here. Some of the religious organizations, for example, have acquired properties where they get rental values, they have halls where people hold weddings, and we go and clear the refuse. Why not give me something to help me do that? It is the same thing with the consumption tax for all the clubs, for all the people who have furnished apartments, running unlicensed businesses, they are making money, they are generating refuse and I am coming to pack it. Citizens go in there and out of there, if the place is not safe, people will not go there. I secure the area. It is only fair that you give me something back to do this. After there is a party, everybody runs away. We send out LAWMA and others to go and clear the refuse and I must pay them. The vehicle that will cart away the refuse runs on diesel, it must be funded. That is why we call for these things.

And, of course, when you look at the tax spectrum, you get paid only for what you engage in. It is not as if you are sitting down in your house privately with your wife and somebody comes and says oya come and pay consumption tax.
It doesn’t happen that way. Once you engage, you pay; the more you engage the more you pay, you pay as you go. What we’ve done, for example, with consumption tax is to try to take the benefit of the tourist income that comes into this country. All of us that have travelled out of this country at one time or the other have paid that tax in one hotel or the other outside this country. Now, tourists come into our economy, they don’t pay, they go. So if you don’t go and stay in any hotel, you don’t pay it. So why should it be a vexed question? So this is a tax that does not apply across board that is why I say the debate should be what spectrum of society is affected by this. It is not when you are buying elubo in Mile 12 Market then someone will come and ask you to pay consumption tax. We have said it does not apply to the bukka. But if you come here (La Scala Restaurant), of course, you will pay consumption tax. That is the way that some tax equity is done across board in society; to take from those who have, those who indulge in more luxurious life, to give something back to support the system. That is how it has been. I didn’t invent it, I met it, and I like it.

OSHODI
Someone raised the issue of Oshodi. Let me say that Oshodi is still work in progress; there is a lot of work still to do there. Some of the molues that you see there, if we take them out of business, you will be the first to write that Fashola has taken their jobs. So we are saying, ‘let’s share this road, let commuters move, you take this side’. Those places where you see them are still part of the work to be done to create proper laybacks. Construction work is still going to go on there; we are still going to put them in a more orderly manner with proper laybacks to come up to the road. As for the street lights, again I think rather than bash us, you should commend us because there is no power, we are powering it with diesel because of the concern we have about security. But I tell you one thing, that is not the reason why it is not functioning; the project has not been handed over so some of the light you see off and on is still being tested. That is why you they are experiencing the off and on. It is still a work in progress.

REFUSE DUMP AT OJOTA
Refuse dump, yes it depends on the time of day you pass there. The truth is that I am not the one saying it anymore; this State is cleaner than it was last night. I am not the one saying it. Just a few days ago, the Federal Ministry of Environment adjudged Lagos to be the cleanest State in the whole country now. It didn’t make that adjudication. It is a whole spectrum of where we were coming from and what we have done. But, sometimes, when you see un-evacuated refuse here and there, we are quick to forget. I remember that when Governor Tinubu first came they were mountains. He reduced it to barely litter before he left and that is what we are pushing off from. Sometimes you see bins full and have not been taken, not evacuated; it is probably because the vehicle that is servicing that area is caught in the same traffic you and I face. There are areas where you have to evacuate four times a day, there are areas where you do it twice and there are places you have to do it once. But if you move around this State at night, from around 1.00 a.m., you will see all of them working at those bins. Those refuse you see in the mornings are not the first ones. They are the ones generated between 6.00 a.m. and 9.00 a.m.

LOCAL GOVERNMENTS
For the relationship between the State and Local Governments, I think I could not do better than to say that we find a clear responsibility set out in the Second and Fourth Schedules of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. The responsibilities of the Federal, the states and the local government are clearly set out there. But suffice to say that the constitution that we have is an anomalous constitution that incorporates the local government in a clearly difficult-to-understand role; because in a Federation, the usual federating units are the states. They then agree to create an artificial leader entity called the Federal Government to take common areas of responsibility on their behalf; common currency, the determination of who is a citizen, the determination of banking operations, Army, internal and external affairs and those areas that can commonly be accomplished by it to eliminate wastage.

The question of whether or not to have local government in the first place and what number is usually left to the state governments to determine, and that is why there is now this anomalous situation that ‘okay we took a little of this and that. They say that you cannot create a local government even now unless you do so by state law. They now say ‘okay take it to the National Assembly’. It is anomalous; I don’t know where else it happens because it is really a matter for the state to decide and it is a matter of political consideration for a state to say we want fewer local governments here. Or one party says we are going to govern with 50 local governments here; and another party says ‘look, we think that 30 can do the job. It becomes a political matter even for people to decide which number of local governments to have in an election. And that is why in so many federations across the world the number of local governments continues to vary depending on which party or which government is in power. But that is when the state has the ability to influence how the local governments operate. But on the day you were voting for local government councilors and chairmen, you didn’t see me there, I wasn’t contesting. So we have constitutionally created local government chairmen. So in the same way that I will not surrender my sovereignty to the Federal Government, I don’t expect to go and be nosing and giving orders what they should do. They were elected by you. But what we have done is that we have found some areas of cooperation in some obligations that we can commonly manage and that is when we came up with the Land Use Charge. There are taxes that relate to land that is due to the local governments, there are those that relate to land that is due to the state government. And we thought that instead of putting citizens through going to pay tax twice, one to the state, one to the local government on the same property, why don’t we harmonize it so the citizens can pay once. These are areas of common agreement that we work on. The Constitution gives the local governments the right to manage advertisements, but it gives the state the responsibility to manage land. Where do you put the billboard on my land? So let’s work together. That was why we put the Advertisement and Signage Law into place. We have representatives of the State and the Local Governments on the board so that the two can share responsibilities and have one central authority that give out advertisement licenses. It is those areas that we share cross-responsibilities that we try to harmonize in the interest of the citizenry. Otherwise, they are autonomous.

AREA BOYS
About the Area Boys, I think that if you go round the State today and if you care to check, the numbers are reducing and they have reduced drastically. And I say so with every sense of responsibility. They are the ones greening, planting trees, planting flowers, and then they work at nights with our waste disposal teams. All of them are in our data base, they are employed, they get their salaries, they are working at many of our construction sites because every time we go to the State’s Tenders Board, we ask the project contractors to give us 10 slots, 20 slots of daily-paid workers and we send them there. They are working at Campos Square where we are doing a football field, they were the ones who installed the entire seats in Teslim Balogun Stadium, they were just supervised by the contractor. I have put them to use and they are happy unless those of them who don’t want to work. And as we reduce the number of those who were subjected to desperate conditions due to circumstances, it reduces the pressure on our law enforcement agents to manage the few ones left. But it is work in progress, it is never finished. The streets of Vancouver are taken over by street gangs today as I speak to you, shooting themselves on a daily basis. It is not peculiar to us, it is an economic issue and I must say that we deserve some commendation for the strategies we have deployed in dealing with them.

MILE 2, APAPA–OSHODI EXPRESSWAY
For Mile 2, relate it with Apapa, Oshodi, I think the problem is that it is unfortunate that that road deteriorated to its current level. This was a matter that I thought that by two years ago we would have started to deal with. It was a matter that I had agitated two years ago but sadly, we didn’t start on time as a people. I don’t think that we could gain a lot from buck-passing or from trading blames. I think that the important thing now is that we recognize that there is a problem that needs to be solved. We can trade blames from now till the end of the world but I don’t think that is what the people who put us here want to know about. I think that some rehabilitation has taken place on that road and in a short time, we are going to fix it, working with the Federal Government who has control over the road and who has control over the ports where the stress is so heavily impacting.

Around Mile 2, Orile and Ajegunle, there is a network of roads there that has not received attention in a while and you couldn’t do anything rewarding. But if you go to Ajegunle, we are working in, I think, about six roads. We plan to do a total of 19. In Orile, we are planning to do a parallel road of the Lagos-Badagry Expressway that will take you from the end of Babs Animashaun, through Opeluyeru, straight to Mile 2. Construction is going on, we have told the contractor what is to be done and we say until we finish one, the other won’t be done. It is a work in progress and we will get to everywhere.

On a general basis also we have to determine which road to do first and our decision as to which road first is not always determined by how bad the road is but the volume of traffic that is there. So, we may not be on one street because there is a bigger road where everybody else empties into and it is bad. So, if we take one street and work on it while people suffer, I don’t think the principle of greatest good for the greatest number of people would have applied, and that is the basic principle upon which government allocates resources and distributes projects; which number gives the greatest good at any particular point in time because resources, as I said are not infinite.

INCIDENCE OF COLLAPSED BUILDINGS
Collapsed buildings are really a problem. But let me say for the records that in the last two years only one building that was under construction, and that was a building at Ogudu, has collapsed. So over the last ten years, we have come from a situation of all sorts of buildings collapsing, and there are two categorizations and I say this because it is important, building collapse under construction has reduced significantly. What you now have collapsing are buildings built 20, 30, 40 to 50 years ago. In an attempt to stop the collapse of buildings, a law was passed in the last administration which provided in section 74 that if your building collapses, it would be forfeited to the State. But it doesn’t seem that the public is aware. I have placed advert, encouraging people to go and test their own buildings, to look at the structural integrity of their own buildings and to bring them down if they are no longer structurally stable and rebuild instead of forfeiting the land to the State. But clearly, with every good intention, it will take quite a while to take root. We have done enumeration of distressed buildings. Every time we detect a distressed building and want to bring them down, they run to you – the media, “Fashola wants to bring our building down”. Even buildings that belong to my own staff in Ogba, a Housing Estate of Public Officers, a building collapsed, I am not sure now whether there was a fatality, and we saw that the two next to it were distressed and we wanted to pull them down, they went to Court and sought an injunction to stop us from pulling them down. So, you do it, you are damned, you don’t do it, you are damned.

So, really, it is a choice that we must make. We know what the problem is. But we are not getting enough support from some areas and this is one of those areas. Of course I understand that there is shortage of accommodation. But the real issue here is that only the living will need accommodation because there is a permanent accommodation for those who are not living. And nobody struggles over that land, the most important piece of real estate.

REFORMS TO STEM BUILDING COLLAPSE
Really, it is a choice thing here. We don’t want buildings to collapse. It diminishes us any time these things happen and especially when we lose people. But, it is a people-thing. You want to evacuate people from distressed building, it is either there is a Court order stopping you. If you don’t comply, you are seen as high-handed. So, we continue to try. But there is a lot of reform going on. There is a bill now before the House of Assembly that will enable us, as we tackle the already built structures, to create a building control department that will ensure quality of materials, supervision during construction and so many other things. Again, in the process of scrutinizing building approvals, you get a complaint; it is taking too long to get building approvals. But the professionals must do their work. If they don’t do it, the net result you will get at the end of the day is that structurally you will have a problem. And in this part of the world also, we build without the necessary professional involvement. We don’t certify buildings as habitable for use. How many buildings are insured? These are the private sector capacity that ultimately has a huge impact to ensuring that the buildings are built to a sound and safe quality. It is not solely by government inspection because no insurer will take on a policy on a defective building because he does not want to pay claims. And these are the things you (as media) can help us do because we are coming to do it anyway; enforcing the Insurance Law, the Law already exists. That is the way you can ensure that a building is structurally sound and safe because an insurer can take on the risk which he has measured and say, “I can take the risk of insuring this building because we are going there”. You will give us a certificate of insurance while you are building; you will give us a certificate of insurance when you finish building, otherwise we will not give you the file of approval. Because it is not just enough to expect that the District Officer will be able to monitor buildings across the State. So if insurance companies issue insurance certificate for buildings under construction, clearly, it will be in their interest to put people at the site to ensure that the right things are done. And this is the way it is done all over the world.

But here we by-pass all the professionals and we just build. And in this way also you can address some of your employment problems. The Estate Surveyors and Estate Valuers will find work and again you have a business boom in the insurance sub-sector of our economy. This is how it happens all over the world. As to the fact that the whole process may be expensive, the question I have always asked is whether anybody can take all the money and give me back one life. If anybody can take all of that money and give back that one life that is lost. It is a question of life and death here. Expenses don’t come into it. Our responsibility is to save life, whatever it costs. And in any event, may be what you think is more expensive just simply supports cutting corners; because this is how it is done all over the world where it is successful. So, if you want to cut corners and still expect perfection, I tell you, it won’t work. The cost of a clean city is that you must not do those things that litter the city. The cost of efficient transportation means that you and I must refrain from shopping in traffic. You can’t be shopping in traffic and expect traffic to move, it won’t, because the man next to you will do the same thing. And he has to collect change. Ikorodu is complaining of traffic, but there are over 50 parties going on there every weekend. They are bringing in food, the musicians are bringing in their equipment, they are bringing in water, drinks, all of the invitees are taking their cars, where are they going to pass? Traffic on Saturdays in Lagos are worse than Mondays. Unless I can’t help it, I don’t go out on Saturdays; when you have more than 200 parties, each one with a minimum of 500 people attending with their cars.

It is a whole economy, you can’t change it. And that is why when people complain that well there is no premier league, that’s our premier league. If you go to the major cities of the United Kingdom on Saturdays, go near their stadia, you can’t get there. It is a beehive of trading, merchandizing, Tee-shirts, rackets, everything being sold. Go to the parties, it is the same thing happening, they are selling sweets, they are selling drinks, they are selling souvenirs, people are supplying rice, supplying drinks that’s the economy. That is what is happening, there is no difference. So that is our premier league. It is an economy. If you don’t hold parties here, there will be a systemic economic shock. People make that money every weekend; the tailors are sewing caps, Aso Ebi. It is a huge economy, make no mistake about it. The printers are printing invitation cards for burials, for weddings, for birthdays, all those boys who are singing and drumming, it is a weekend business, don’t make any mistake about it. The economy I have not been able to quantify it but it is a huge economy. Then it is when everybody has finished, we come to clear the refuse. Then the roads are free again. It is the way we chose to live.

CREATING NEW TOWNS
Creating new towns is a brilliant idea, and let me say, as I speak now, some new towns already exist. I went into Lekki Phase 2 which is an area of well over two hectares of land, the same thing in Abijo. Almost on a weekly basis, in the last two years, we have approved C of O, approved this, approved that, give papers as an incentive for people to develop their land, the road network exists, the drainage is there, the electrification is in place, but people are not moving. As an attempt to encourage people to move there we have sited two major housing estates there which we went to inspect last week. And the truth is that N3 billion will not build you a road network with water, with drainage and so on. Such estates in other jurisdictions are not built with only internal capital. They are investment positions taken from all over the world. The same thing has happened in places like Dubai. But what have we done to support investment climate here? The truth is that everyday we open a Nigerian Newspaper, what you see there is that we are corrupt, crime. So, if you are reading that from far away, will you bring money here? Will you take money to Darfur now in Sudan? That is the reality. So that is what we put out there in the public domain. That is part of the problem we have with the power sector today. The people who have oversight function on the power sector are facing trial today; the regulator in the ministry is facing trial, the contractor that is performing the job alleged of crime. Somebody must bring money. That’s what we have put in the public domain. We have told the whole world that every sector of our power sector, the regulation, oversight, legislation, are all corrupt. We put it out there.

RESPONSIBILITIES AS GATEKEEPERS
Again, you are information gate-keepers. Nobody is suggesting that you compromise information management; but truly, once you say that you are who you are, we will deal with you as whom you say you are. There have been unsavoury reports concerning a few Governors in the US, but the Americans are not saying all their Governors are thieves. How many governors have you convicted? In this business, opinion is free, but the facts? How many of us even know how the system works? I don’t sign cheques. When I was being elected, you elected me with full executive powers. But immediately I became Governor, I put some control on myself. There is a limit to the contracts that I can award. I imposed it on myself, and I said from this point on, let’s go to the Executive Council. But people publish all sorts of things, say all sorts of things. I have never signed a cheque even when I was Chief of Staff, all I did is sign approval. The process of getting money from Lagos State treasury is not that simple, the booklet is in six duplicates and it moves around. The people you have to collude with to defraud the system are many, unless you are suggesting that I come down from this exalted office and go and collude with a cashier in the Treasury to take money out. And I think these are some of the things you should really go out and investigate and see the process of processing payments so that you will be able to validate some of these things that are being bandied around. The only cheque I keep is my personal bank account. So, it is what we put out there that determines what we get back.

PROVISION OF POTABLE WATER
About water, seriously, we are doing a lot in terms of water and this thing also takes time to deliver. The problem we have is that Iju and Adiyan have a combined capacity of about 130 million gallons of water a day. But that was when they were running at full capacity. We have power problem. So what we are doing now, we are building a 12 megawatt IPP. The machine is installed; what is going on now is the reticulation of the pipeline to access it to the Gas link Grid for gas. But we just have to do it each by inch until it is finished. However, that does not even solve the problem. Simultaneously we are building 15 micro-water works. We awarded 12 last year, and this year we have awarded three more and they will give us two million gallons each which will give an additional capacity of 30 million gallons. As I speak, four of them have been concluded. They should all be concluded this year except for the three that were awarded early this year.

Sometimes, the truth is that we are just too busy dealing with the work that we don’t do the celebration of commissioning as a Government. So, sometimes you may not know that these things are going on. But what we are looking at is to replicate another major water supply facility for about at least another 70 million gallons around Epe so that they can relieve Lekki, Ikoyi and, may be Victoria Island from Iju and Adiyan so that we have two big supply systems at both sides of the City. With all these, we will then be able to see whether we have reached the optimum or there are still a lot to be done.

But, of course that is not the end of the problem. Some of the reticulation tanks, pipes that have taken water into Lagos homes are as old as 30-40 years. When full pressure is applied, we are going to see a new set of problems which we cannot anticipate now. Pipes will rupture and that will create a new problem. But it is work in progress the problem is not peculiar to us.